


The Memory Well

by athelas



Category: Smallville
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Clark as Superman, Friends to Enemies, Friendship, Gen, Implied Slash, Lex Needs Therapy, Love/Hate, M/M, Memory, Smallville Season 11 AU, Smallville Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 08:30:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7632613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athelas/pseuds/athelas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When an encounter with Superman triggers a repressed memory, President Luthor must confront a fact of his past that could dismantle his life: his relationship with Clark Kent. Episode referenced: Memoria (3.19). Season 11 AU. Can be read as Clark/Lex slash or friendship. Mostly Lex Angst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Memory Well

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luthienne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luthienne/gifts).



> Dedicated to anyone else who was ever frustrated by scenes in which Clark and Lex saved each other, but we didn't get to see the actual saving part.

THE MEMORY WELL

Dr. Marlene Hayes sat on the edge of a loveseat in the presidential suite of the Hyatt Regency, Metropolis. White roses filled a vase on the coffee table, not at a hint of wilt in their petals, and a white ribbon wrapped the throat of the vase like a necktie. The glass of the table glinted with midday sun; a promenade of windows stretched out to her left.

The man on the couch across from her had loosened his necktie and wore his signature solid white suite. On tv, she had always thought his face had a rounded, youthful look, but in person that same face seemed sharper, more angular, lined with age. The Secret Service bracketed the door outside, and she felt like even pitted hearts of the flowers watched her like cameras.

"This is possibly...the most traditional route I've taken," said the President. "Most of the specialists I've seen have been operating experimentally. Physical, chemical, neural manipulation."

"Those doctors were fishing," said Dr. Hayes. "Trying to recover a memory. Think of my process as dissection: you already caught the fish, and now we need to open it up."

"I don't think that there is need to remind you of confidentiality, and of the severe ramifications should any of this information be leaked?"

"Mr. President, my moral compass is skewed towards my own head. Tell me what you were doing-- what precipitated the memory."

The President blinked. His back was hunched; he held tension in his shoulders. "Let's say a situation arose in which, once again, he--"

"Superman?"

"--he felt a need to obstruct a project of mine that would help tens of thousands of people in my country. I anticipated this. He has all the subtlety of a flaming chariot falling to earth. For years now, I've been working on a containment field to that would restrain him if he, once again, stepped in my way, _his_ moral compass ubiquitously skewed toward the individual at the expense of the larger populace.

"You probably know that he and I have been locked in a kind of tête–à–tête since I entered politics. You might wonder how it's possible for a mere mortal to battle against the sun, for someone born of man to face the Titan, for David to face Goliath. The key is never to believe yourself to be David, and to look to other stories in which a god was brought to his knees. Samson. Achilles. The hair, the heel."

"Are you saying you found Superman's Achilles heel?"

"Through careful observation and research. From what I know of my previous life, this meticulous attention to a single pursuit has always been a trait of mine. It's...comforting to know that some threads of my personality have carried over. That I'm not just a blank slate."

"Are there days when you feel that way? Blank?"

The President cleared his throat. "My previous life is just another project to pursue, doctor. That Superman has a weakness at all is a privileged piece of information."

"Consider me a confessional."

"I'm not exactly religious."

"You sure reference the Bible a lot."

A tease of laughter, more like an exhale, but some humor all the same. For the first time all day, Dr. Hayes didn't imagine her head rolling across the floor.

"Is there a connection between this project of your life and the situation you encountered with Superman?" she asked.

"Maybe," he said. The sound barely passed his teeth, as if the word had lodged in his throat. "My team developed it. It was a shallow pool with a kind of grate in the center into which his constraints could be lowered."

"And what was the pool filled with?"

"A specialized solution. There is a certain meteor rock, green, that has been the basis for a wide range of experimentation within my company. Even before my memory loss, according to company documentation. This rock produces an effect in Superman. In large enough quantities, it takes the form of a debilitating sickness. In any quantity at all-- something small as a pendant --it can stall him."

"You say that Superman got in your way. What set off his moral compass this time?"

"We're not talking about a game of monkey in the middle, doctor. He doesn't just show up. Our lives are more entwined than that. My scientists have been developing a low-impact bacterial pathogen-- it would induce the equivalent of a mild flu, according to trials --to test how we might administer two strains of an antidote, one airborne and one waterborne, to the city. We selected three sites: two prisons in which prisoners signed their consent to the experiment and a company factory in which workers were given incentives to participate but not penalized for opting out. Each situation was highly controlled, no unwilling participants were involved, and the effects of that research would have been invaluable to our defense in the case of chemical warfare. We could've added to our arsenal."

The impassivity in the President's face made it difficult to tell whether he or not he was lying. "I take it Superman heard about this experiment and didn't see it in the same way," said Dr. Hayes.

"Superman has a very simplistic ethical viewpoint. Any hint of what he sees as human experimentation, he comes running,. What people want for themselves, for their safety, for their city, none of that matters. If he determines that us humans are incapable of understanding our own limits and taking in our own risks, he steps in and plays god in the guise of heroism. He makes our decisions for us. He strips our ability to defend ourselves.

"This particular obstruction happened on the day when we were scheduled to release the pathogen. I was at LC headquarters, watching the distribution via telecast. We had quarantined doctors ready at each site and would distribute the pathogen through the vent systems in each facility."

"Did you anticipate that Superman would show up on this day?"

"I know exactly how he thinks. He couldn't be at all three facilities simultaneously, so he would certainly show up at headquarters to try to shut down central control. To confront me. I knew that once he had attacked all of us, maybe after destroying the main computer, he would go to each facility and clean out our setup. I had constraints fashioned with embedded meteor rock. We exposed him initially when he entered the building,"

"It seems easy enough," she said. "You could just have meteor rock ready on every level of the building."

"It's anything but easy," he snapped. He shot up to standing and started to pace. "He's always able to enter subtly, I don't know how the hell he does that. I have experts working night and day to track down whatever friend of his keeps hacking our security system. He has somebody on his side, some brains to supplement his brawn. No matter what, he'd eventually have to come to me; he always comes to me.

"We kept all meteor rock in the control room where I was waiting. It was easier that way. A single room I could line with lead. A whole building..."

"Lead. The Lois Lane report."

"Yes. She painted it as his only weakness, that he couldn't see through lead. _That_ isn't a weakness. That's like saying Achilles's weakness was his peanut allergy."

"This classified knowledge you have of Superman-- you seem a bit defensive about it. It matters to you, doesn't it? That only you have this information?"

The pacing slowed and the President turned to look down at her. She tried her best to keep her spine erect, her chin up, tried not to wither and not to fixate on the movements of his black-gloved hand.

"I think," he said. "It would be better if we kept this line of questioning from getting too speculative. I'm not here to sort out the intricacies of my emotions. I'm here to account for a memory."

"I apologize, Mr. President, but sometimes we _must_ access emotion to access memory."

"I believe I can avoid that."

"What happened next?"

"I didn't want him to know just how extensively I'd prepared for him. In fact, I wanted him to think that I wasn't expecting him at all. I gave the illusion that I was secure in the project's level of secrecy, and allowed him to infiltrate with ease. It was a three-step restraint plan. Expose him with the rock, bind him in the meteor constraints, transport him to the holding pool."

"It went smoothly?"

The President paused, his eyes somewhere beyond the window. He was standing behind her now. She turned on the loveseat and lay her arm across the seatback as she watched him, framed by the height of the sun, looking out at rooftops that collected and rose like bar graphs beyond the window. When he spoke, his voice dropped and came out muted, private.

"He always looks surprised," the President said. "No matter what I do, how I do it, there's this moment when he looks appalled, hurt, even. Even if it's masked behind anger and righteousness. I see it."

Superman's face sprang to the therapist's mind, that face chiseled from rock, those eyes that could contain a city, blue as country sky. Sadness, in such a face, seemed like a striking concept, almost beautiful.

"Something made this time different, didn't it?" she asked.

"It's been awhile since I've poured my own scotch," the President said, making his way to the minibar. Dr. Hayes kept her head down when he passed her. She fixated on the gleam of his shoes, shell-like against the champagne of the carpet. Glass and ice clinked and the whole room seemed washed in a kind of misplaced light. Surely the warmth that filled this hotel room was intended for somewhere else. The President drank with his ungloved hand, kept the black glove sheathed in the pocket of his dress pants.

Dr. Hayes waited for him to return to the couch across from her. It took two swigs of whiskey. Then he came back and sat on the edge, as if anticipating something. He ran the gloved hand over his face and it lingered around his mouth, fingers tapping the bottom lip. It was the first time the therapist would've described his mannerisms as childlike.

"Yes, it was different," he said quietly.

"When did it happen?"

"He was about to be lowered all the way in," said the President. "We kept the room dim and the green solution was bright as a lantern. His face was bathed in the only light anywhere."

"Is this where we come to the memory?"

The President nodded slowly.

"I don't know how to tell this part," he said. "It's...fractured."

"Tell me exactly where you were standing in relation to the tank."

"I was standing...close. Close enough that I could breathe against the glass."

"What were you looking at?'

"His face. We were directly level. There were other people in the room but it felt like we were alone."

"What happened, Mr. President?"

"Lex."

"What happened, Lex?"

"That's what happened. My name. He said my name. _Lex. Help me_."

A quick, shaken drink, and for the first time the President made eye contact with her, as if he were pleading. In some ways, he _was_ pleading: his face, vacillating between control and the lack of it, and his body, overly rigid, then overly fluid, all of it was a plea. She allowed the silence to sit for a moment. Then, right when she was considering speaking again, the words started to tumble from him.

"His head went to the side so that he was facing me, and his eyes barely opened. That's how much pain he was in, he could hardly flutter his eyes, hardly _do_ anything. Already that seemed familiar. I could feel something about it, it resonated, and suddenly it's like I was standing in another place, a broader place with higher ceilings, but I was in my own body and his face was his face. Almost."

Dr. Hayes leaned forward. "What do you mean, almost? Are you saying you remember knowing Superman?"

"His face was younger. Blue eyes, dark hair, all the same, but less of a cultivated image somehow. He was a boy. And I could feel it in my bones: so was I. Not so young, but younger."

"Try to focus on the details of the repressed memory. Note the subtle differences. Where were you standing?"

"Same place."

"And you were looking at a tank?"

"A similar tank, yes. The glass between us was broken, I remember it shattered at my feet and the solution from the pool was everywhere. I think I broke it. Maybe the whole room was falling apart. I remember sparks. Everything around us flickering. "

"You said the room was bigger."

"The pool was connected to something, some larger apparatus. The walls felt far away."

"Was anyone else in the room?"

The President shut his eyes and shook his head, and she could tell by the rocky breath he drew that he was starting to panic. She stood, walked over, and coaxed him to lie down. After some resistance, he did.

"Mr. President." She drew an office chair over from a nearby desk so that she could sit directly beside him. "Lex. I want you to visualize, present tense. You're in a room where everything's flickering. Who's in the room?"

"My father."

"Your father is there?"

"No. Not really. I can't do this present tense bullshit."

"It's imperative, Lex, that you walk through this memory. Keep your eyes closed."

"The room feels tunneled," he said. "I don't know if that's important--"

"Everything is important. Continue to describe the room."

"It's tunneled and lined with yellow fluorescents. Vaulted ceilings. There's an overlook above the pool. I remember looking up at those lights-- I've been in that same position, lying in the solution, probes on my skin. I've been where he is lying now."

"Your father. What's he doing here?"

"He's not actually here. Maybe he's upstairs." _A downstairs room_ , she made a mental note. "Whatever has happened here, it _reeks_ of him."

"And there's no one else there besides you and Superman?"

His eyes gave a flutter and almost opened. He made a single, distinct motion with his fingers, two fingers out as if he were checking the air for a pulse. "There's a body," he said. "A doctor. Someone died."

"Come back to Superman," she said, racing past this new detail as if she could erase it. "Does Superman say anything?"

Lex smirked, but it died away quickly. Something strained and abstract replaced it. He stayed quiet so long that she wondered if he had fallen asleep. Then, finally, his eyes opened, and he turned his head to the side in the same way Superman must have.

"He says the same thing," said Lex. "In a younger voice, but it's his."

"Has he ever called you by your name before?"

"No. He calls me Luthor. He has since I've known him."

Lex had no way of knowing that this had been a crafted reflex, that it had taken Clark more than a year to train his mouth to shape the new word. Lex couldn't remember their last meeting, or the fact that he had drawn attention to the way Clark said his name: _with a hopeful finish_. Clark would never be able to say the name _Lex_ without some hint of hope, and so he used the last name instead, the surname, the stain, the curse that Lex had fought for so long.

Clark's name, on the other hand, danced at the periphery of Lex's mind like a wisp in the air, something he couldn't grasp.

"Lex," said Dr. Hayes. "This next part is important. I need you to walk back to the first memory. Can you do that? Let me know when you're there. Superman is Superman, cape and all."

Some silence. Then he gave a single, tight nod.

"I need you to think about how you're _feeling_. Yes, this is the emotional stuff, but stay present with me. Looking at him, how do you feel? Repulsed? Angry? Frustrated? You have your nemesis where you want him and your experiment can run unhindered. What do you feel?"  
  
"I feel triumphant."

"What about him? What do you feel towards him?"

"I don't know if I even have the lexicon of words you're looking for."

The fact that she was tempted to break her client's concentration with an inappropriate pun ("I'm sure you have every word you need in your _Lex_ icon") reminded Dr. Hayes just how frayed and anxious she was. She scooted the chair away slightly. "Try," she said.

"I wish he would see things my way. I want him to know that this will help people, that sometimes it takes some experimentation if you want to save the world. I'm aggravated. I'm fascinated."

"Good," she said, too quickly. Her heart thudded. "Now if you place yourself back in the room with the boy," she continued. "What do you feel?"

Suddenly, his eyes squeezed tight and shot open. He drew a staggering breath. He tilted his head up towards her and the whites of his eyes were bloodshot, filmed over with moisture.

"I don't know," he said.

She fought the urge to put a hand on the shoulder of his dress shirt. He sat up and darted glances around the room, as if ghosts watched from the embroidered towels and the pillow mints. He reached for the whiskey, but there was none left, and his hand hovered, confused as he was.

Dr. Hayes brought him a glass of water that he refused. She poured him another scotch, neat, and he accepted it.

"We can go over this tomorrow," he said, after downing half the glass like a shot. "I'm done for today." He collapsed back onto the couch and began to roll up his shirt sleeves.

Dr. Hayes gathered her things. Once she had her briefcase slung across her shoulders, she turned back.

"Mr. President," she said. "This is good. This is progress. We'll keep at it. Is there anything else you want to say before I leave?"

He shook his head. But then, as she started to leave, he reached out and caught her arm limply with his gloved hand. She looked down. Whatever moved beneath the leather did not feel like it contained the precise joints and weight of a hand.

"I shut the whole project down," he said.

She made a move to sit again, but he waved her towards the door.

"Everything fell apart. My team thought I'd gone mad. We lifted him out, removed the constraints, lay him unconscious on the rooftop and I shut down not only the planned pathogen release, but the whole project and department. It's like something inside of me snapped shut. He slammed a door on me, like he does every damn time.

"Why? When he isn't there, I can be rational. Then my chance comes and why, when I have that chance, can't I take it? Why can I never, _never_ kill him?"

Dr. Hayes drew a slow breath. "I just wanted to remind you," she said softly. "Of confidentiality. I will never say a word."

His mouth twitched for a moment, the ghost of a grin, and then it took only the slightest inclination of the head for her to know that she was formally dismissed.

She kept a poised pace to the door and managed to keep from shaking as security searched her, as Secret Service escorted her down through the elevator, through the golden lobby, and out to the flashing, lurching sunlight, out to a city that bowed to no god and quieted for no one.

A black car waited for her, gleaming like a shell.

 

* * *

 

Lex traced his thumb over the convex design of the whiskey glass. Something still trembled at his core, and it kept him from sitting still. He stood and walked to the window again. Outside, sunlight blared off of asphalt rooftops where elaborate networks of piping spidered out, connecting things that didn't seem like they should be connected: concrete window ledges, potted flowers, clotheslines, solid glass exteriors. The hotel room smelled like lemon: a little too clean.

_What do you feel?_

"I want to be the one to protect him this time," Lex whispered out loud, testing the words. "I want us to be the only two people in the room, in any given room on any given day."

He had suspected already-- from previous snatches of memory, from strange associations, from that mysterious, sourceless hurt that clouded Superman's eyes --that they might have known each other in that previous, lost life.

But the boy in the pool needed Lex. Surely Lex had never needed anyone.

He put the whiskey glass down on the ground. If he didn't put it down, he would spill it, but he couldn't summon the willpower to walk over to a table. Instead, he settled it between parted carpet fibers. He felt a familiar, backtracking urge to shut the whole project down, only now it was the project of his life, of learning about the person he had been. Cancel all experimentation, all prototypes. Empty the pool of Kryptonite. Lex didn't want to know.

The President had a country to protect, after all, and he couldn't be weakened by such a desire: to save a single person at the expense of everyone else.

In one fleeting flash, the pane of glass in front of him became every other pane of glass he'd ever looked through, and a once-beloved face turned toward him again.

Lex balled his fists and shut his eyes. The vision only grew clearer.

Any given room. Any given day.

 

* * *

  
THIRTEEN YEARS AGO

Lex had broken the glass in the memory well. Shards ripped his coat, nicked his hands, and the ground flooded past his ankles. Clark was alone, stripped, and Lex looked up at the collapsed platform where Dr. Garner had once stood behind a band of light. Now, Dr. Garner lay dead, his limbs splayed as light flashed across him.

Clark seemed almost drugged. The procedure had never had such a drastic effect on Lex. With the solution drained, the metal grate in the center seemed to hover at Lex's eye level, and the metal memory probes formed a cage around Clark's head.

"Clark," said Lex.

Clark tipped his head to the side. "Lex," he said. "Help me."

The way he said it cleaved Lex in two. Gone was the anger, the irritation at Clark's insistence on interfering with Lex's memory treatments, the shock that Clark had gone to Lionel for help. Gone, also, was any thought of those treatments at all, of the lost seven days, of Julian and Lillian, of Belle Reve, visions and prisons and nightmares. Only Clark remained.

"I'm going to get you out of here," said Lex.

A spark above them. A creak and a crash, somewhere to the right. Lex's mind played a reel of the many times he'd been the one lying helpless, the times he'd woken feeling impossibly weightless in Clark's arms, woken in a hospital bed only to find that Clark had somehow gotten him there, or just woken to the sight of Clark sitting with him. Lex had never been the savior. This time, he would be the one to see Clark safely home.

Resolved, Lex stripped his overcoat and let it fall into the water at his feet. He rolled up his sleeves, grabbed the top rim of the memory well, and heaved himself over. Once he had clambered in to the closed space between Clark and the tank wall, he winced and looked down at his hands. At least twenty glass shards had embedded themselves in his palms, which ran slick now with tiny circles of blood.

Clark muttered something, jarring Lex back. Lex began to pull off the probes that lined Clark's chest; he tried to be gentle when he came to the probes around the head. After he was done, Lex smoothed back Clark's hair and ran the back of his hand along the trail of indentations on Clark's chest, checking for any serious damage.

"Let's get you home," Lex said.

He tried to wrap his arms around Clark's torso and tilt the two of them together. Clark responded, dazed, his hands weakly settling on Lex's shoulders as they eased him up to sitting. As soon as Clark's weight transferred against him, Lex nearly fell back over the edge.

The wreckage of Dr. Garner's observation deck formed makeshift steps near the head of the tank. Lex guided them in that direction, Clark's head heavy on his shoulder. They would collapse any moment, Lex was sure of it. Lex leaned Clark against the tank wall while he boosted himself over the rim and down. Clark looked at the green water pooling on the ground beneath them and shuddered. It took a series of boosts and pulls to get them both over.

Once there, Clark leaned against Lex again, and they started to fumble their way through the obstacle course. There were moments when all the lights flickered in tandem and the world plunged into bouts of darkness. In those moments, Lex tried to feel their way forward, his hand groping the dark for collapsed steel bars, his feet prodding broken computer screens. He kept one arm around Clark's waist.

When the exit towered luminous before them, Lex reached for dampened phone in his shirt pocket. Clark seemed to have regained a bit of strength and was standing upright, though each of them kept one hand on the other's back for support.

"I'm calling my driver," Lex said.

Clark looked back towards the tank, then at Lex, dismayed. "They took my clothes," he said.

"I noticed," said Lex. "I'll have him bring you something."

"Could you call my mom instead?"

"Clark, it will take your mom a lot longer to get out here. If my driver at least takes us to the Metropolis penthouse, she can pick you up from there in a few hours. I need to do damage control and find out what happened here, I need to get to the media before my dad spins this wrong."

"Please, Lex. I just want to go home."

Lex sighed. "Ok," he said. "You'll be ok. Let's get out of this place. They cleared the building with the alarm so we should be able to wait in some empty examination room."

Clark cringed at the word "examination". Lex pressed closer to him again, and together they made it through the exit, out to a sterile hallway that looked untouched and unaware.  
The third room in the hallway was a basic exam room with one hospital bed crooked in its center, a set of white drawers, a sink, latex gloves, a waiting bench that issued from the wall. Lex flipped the light switch; everything felt oddly blue. He rummaged for a hospital gown and a towel while Clark called Mrs. Kent, and after a suspiciously short conversation, Clark hung up.

"She'll be here in fifteen minutes," he said, handing the phone back to Lex. "She was in Metropolis today anyway."

Lex knew that upward inflection in Clark's voice. He knew what it meant when Clark's eyes shifted away like that. Unexpectedly, it gutted Lex, that Clark would lie to him right now. "Clark--"

"I don't want to talk. Please."

Lex set his mouth in a tight line, but was still willing, at that moment, to do anything Clark asked. He handed Clark the hospital gown in total silence. Once dry and paper-clothed, Clark sat on the bench and Lex sat beside him, uncomfortable with the idea of waiting, uncomfortable with the quiet and the crinkle of the hospital gown, uncomfortable with the fact that his father was dictating whatever the situation was upstairs, uncomfortable with the vacant hallway, uncomfortable with his own memories and angers that had started to creep back up. No, not yet. He didn't want to think about the rest of the world yet. He leaned into Clark's arm and Clark leaned back, and they stayed like for a moment, the tops of their heads supporting each other. Lex hadn't realized how tired he was.

Lex eased himself away and stood. "If I don't go upstairs, they'll come down to us," he said. "The feds will need to get into the memory well." He rolled down his sleeves and adjusted his shirt collar.

Clark stood too. He no longer seemed pained as he walked over to the drawers.

"What are you--"

"Sit back down one second," said Clark, and Lex thought he caught a hint of a smile in the voice he knew so well. He obeyed. When Clark came back, he was carrying tweezers, antibiotic ointment, and a handful of finger band aids.

Without a word, he took Lex's hand, spread it open in his, and began to pull out the glass.


End file.
